Patches of Evil

The Taliban's latest atrocity.

By

Tunku Varadarajan

Updated May 25, 2001 1:49 a.m. ET

Two months ago, a man called Sayed Rahmatullah Hashimi visited the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. A senior spokesman on foreign affairs for the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, he was on a mission to explain why that regime had undertaken to destroy two giant, and ancient, statues of the Buddha near a town called Bamiyan, 90 miles west of the capital, Kabul.